'Ego Depletion' Explains Why We Make Bad Choices When We're Stressed Out

From your own experience, are you more likely to finish half a
pizza by yourself on a) Friday night after a long work week or b)
Sunday evening after a restful weekend? The answer that most
people will give, of course, is “a.” And in case you hadn’t
noticed, it’s on stressful days that many of us give in to
temptation and choose unhealthy options. The connection between
exhaustion and the consumption of junk food is not just a figment
of your imagination.

And it is the reason why so many diets bite it in the midst of
stressful situations, and why many resolutions derail in times of
crisis.

How do we avoid breaking under stress? There are six simple
rules.

1) Acknowledge the tension, don’t ignore it.

Usually in these situations, there’s an internal dialogue (albeit
one of varying length) that goes something like this:

“I’m starving! I should go home and make a salad and finish off
that leftover grilled chicken.”

“But it’s been such a long day. I don’t feel like
cooking.” [Walks by popular spot for Chinese
takeout] “Plus, beef lo mein sounds amazing right
now.”

“Yes, yes it does, but you really need to finish those vegetables
before they go bad, plus, they’ll be good with some dijon
vinaigrette!”

“Not as good as those delicious noodles with all that tender
beef.”

“Hello, remember the no carbs resolution? And the eat vegetables
every day one, too? You’ve been doing so well!”

“Exactly, I’ve been so good! I can have this one treat…”

And so the battle is lost. This is the push-pull relationship
between reason (eat well!) and impulse (eat that right now!). And
here’s the reason we make bad decisions: we use
our self-control every time we force ourselves
to make the good, reasonable decision, and that self-control,
like other human capacities, is limited.

2) Call it what it is: ego-depletion.

Eventually, when we’ve said “no” to enough yummy food, drinks,
potential purchases, and forced ourselves to do enough unwanted
chores, we find ourselves in a state that Roy Baumeister
calls ego-depletion, where we don’t have
any more energy to make good decisions. So–back to our earlier
question–when you contemplate your Friday versus Sunday night
selves, which one is more depleted? Obviously, the former.

You may call this condition by other names (stressed, exhausted,
worn out, etc.) but depletion is the psychological sum of these
feelings, of all the decisions you made that led to that moment.
The decision to get up early instead of sleeping in, the decision
to skip pastries every day on the way to work, the decision to
stay at the office late to finish a project instead of leaving it
for the next day (even though the boss was gone!), the decision
not to skip the gym on the way home, and so on, and so forth.
Because when you think about it, you’re not actually too tired to
choose something healthy for dinner (after all, you can just as
easily order soup and sautéed greens instead of beef lo mein and
an order of fried gyoza), you’re simply out of will power to make
that decision.

3) Understand ego-depletion.

Enter Baba Shiv (a professor at Stanford
University) and Sasha Fedorikhin (a professor at Indiana
University) who examined the idea that people yield to temptation
more readily when the part of the brain responsible for
deliberative thinking has its figurative hands full.

In this seminal experiment, a group of participants gathered in a
room and were told that they would be given a number to remember,
and which they were to repeat to another experimenter in a room
down the hall. Easy enough, right? Well, the ease of the task
actually depended on which of the two experimental groups you
were in. You see, people in group 1 were given a two-digit number
to remember. Let’s say, for the sake of illustration, that the
number is 62. People in group two, however, were given a
seven-digit number to remember, 3074581. Got that memorized?
Okay!

Now here’s the twist: half way to the second room, a young lady
was waiting by a table upon which sat a bowl of colorful fresh
fruit and slices of fudgy chocolate cake. She asked each
participant to choose which snack they would like after
completing their task in the next room, and gave them a small
ticket corresponding to their choice. As Baba and Sasha
suspected, people laboring under the strain of remembering
3074581 chose chocolate cake far more often than those who had
only 62 to recall. As it turned out, those managing greater
cognitive strain were less able to overturn their instinctive
desires.

This simple experiment doesn’t really show how ego-depletion
works, but it does demonstrate that even a simple cognitive load
can alter decisions that could potentially have an effect on our
lives and health. So consider how much greater the impact of days
and days of difficult decisions and greater cognitive loads would
be.

4) Include and consider the moral implications.

Depletion doesn’t only affect our ability to
make good decisions, it also makes it harder
for us to make honest ones. In one experiment
that tested the relationship between depletion and honesty, my
colleagues and I split participants into two groups, and had them
complete something called a Stroop task, which is a simple task
requiring only that the participant name aloud the color
of the ink a word (which is itself a color) is written
in. The task, however, has two forms: in the first, the color of
the ink matches the word, called the “congruent” condition, in
the second, the color of the ink differs from the word, called
the “incongruent” condition. Go ahead and try both tasks
yourself…

The congruent condition: color matches
word.

The incongruent condition: color conflicts with
word.

As you no doubt observed, naming the color in the incongruent
version is far more difficult than in the congruent. Each time
you repressed the word that popped instantly into your mind (the
word itself) and forced yourself to name the color of the ink
instead, you became slightly more depleted as a result of that
repression.

As for the participants in our experiment, this was only the
beginning. After they finished whichever task they were assigned
to, we first offered them the opportunity to cheat. Participants
were asked to take a short quiz on the history of Florida State
University (where the experiment took place), for which they
would be paid for the number of correct answers. They were asked
to circle their answers on a sheet of paper, then transfer those
answers to a bubble sheet. However, when participants sat down
with the experimenter, they discovered she had run into a
problem. “I’m sorry,” the experimenter would say with
exasperation, “I’m almost out of bubble sheets! I only have one
unmarked one left, and one that has the answers already marked.”
She explained to participants that she did her best to erase the
marks but that they’re still slightly visible. Annoyed with
herself, she admits that she had hoped to give one more test
today after that one, then asks a question: “Since you are the
first of the last two participants of the day, you can choose
which form you would like to use: the clean one or the premarked
one.”

So what do you think participants did? Did they reason with
themselves that they’d help the experimenter out and take the
premarked sheet, and be fastidious about recording their
accidents accurately? Or did they realize that this would tempt
them to cheat, and leave the premarked sheet alone? Well, the
answer largely depended on which Stroop task they had done: those
who had struggled through the incongruent version chose the
premarked sheet far more often than the unmarked. What this means
is that depletion can cause us to put ourselves into compromising
positions in the first place.

And what about the people, in either condition, who chose the
premarked sheet? Once again, those who were depleted by the first
task, once in a position to cheat, did so far more often than
those who breezed through the congruent version of the task.

What this means is that when we become depleted, we’re not only
more apt to make bad and/or dishonest choices, we’re also more
likely to allow ourselves to be tempted to make them in the first
place. Talk about double jeopardy.

5) Evade ego-depletion.

There’s a saying that nothing good happens after midnight, and
arguably, depletion is behind this bit of folk wisdom. Unless you
work the third shift, if you’re up after midnight it’s probably
been a pretty long day for you, and at that point, you’re more
likely to make sub-optimal decisions, as we’ve learned.

So how can we escape depletion?

A friend of mine named Dan Silverman once suggested an
interesting approach during our time together at the Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton, which is a delightful place for
researchers to take a year off to think, plan, and eat very well.
Every day, after a rich lunch, we were plied with
nigh-irresistible desserts: cheesecake, chocolate tortes,
profiteroles, beignets—you name it. It was difficult for all of
us, but especially for poor Dan, who was forever at the mercy of
his sweet tooth.

It was daily dilemma for my friend. Dan, who was an economist
with high cholesterol, wanted dessert. But he also understood
that eating dessert every day was not a good decision. He
contemplated this problem (along with his other academic
interests), and concluded that when faced with temptation, a wise
person should occasionally succumb. After all, by doing so, said
person can keep him- or herself from becoming overly depleted,
which will provide strength for whatever unexpected temptations
lie in wait. Dan decided that giving in to daily dessert would be
his best defense against being caught unawares by temptation and
weakness down the road.

In all seriousness though, we’ve all heard time and time again
that if you restrict your diet too much, you’ll likely to go
overboard and binge at some point. Well, it’s true. A crucial
aspect of managing depletion and making good decisions is having
ways to release stress and reset, and to plan for certain
indulgences. In fact, I think one reason the Slow-Carb Diet seems to be so effective
is because it advises dieters to take a day off (also called a
“cheat” day–see item 4 above), which allows them to avoid
becoming so deprived that they give up entirely. The key here is
planning the indulgence rather than waiting until you have
absolutely nothing left in the tank. It’s in the latter moments
of desperation that you throw yourself on the couch with the
whole pint of ice cream, not even making a pretense of portion
control, and go to town while watching your favorite tv show.

Regardless of the indulgence, whether it’s a new pair of shoes,
some “me time” where you turn off your phone, an ice cream
sundae, or a night out—plan it ahead. While I don’t recommend
daily dessert, this kind of release might help you face down
challenges to your will power later.

6) Know Thyself.

The reality of modern life is that we can’t always avoid
depletion. But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless against it. Many
people probably remember the G.I. Joe cartoon catch phrase:
“Knowing is half the battle.” While this served in the context of
PSAs of various stripes, it can help us here as well. Simply
knowing you can become depleted, and moreover, knowing the kinds
of decisions you might make as a result, makes you far better
equipped to handle difficult situations when and as they arise.